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Linux command line: first steps

5 video lessons · about 41 minutes of video · practice questions on every step

This path is for people who are new to the Linux shell: help-desk staff moving into server work, Windows administrators who have been handed a Red Hat machine, and students preparing for a first Linux certificate. It is made of five short video lessons, each a few minutes long, recorded on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

By the end you will move around the file system with confidence, find out who is logged in and what the system is, keep the clocks correct, and pack files into compressed archives. You need only a Linux machine or virtual machine you can log in to, ideally a RHEL-family one such as Rocky or AlmaLinux, and root or sudo rights for the clock and package steps.

After this path you can

• Navigate directories with ls, cd, pwd, mkdir and relative or home-based paths
• Check logged-in users, identity, uptime and system details with who, w, id and uname
• Explain the hardware and system clocks and set time, date and time zone with timedatectl
• Read and synchronise the hardware clock with date and hwclock
• Count text, list hardware and build, list and extract gzip and tar archives

Start with step 1

The steps

1. 
   Step 1 · 7:16

   Lesson 1: ls, cd and mkdir

   Why ls hides dot files and how ls -a shows them

2. 
   Step 2 · 8:34

   Lesson 2: Essential Linux commands every admin needs

   All the useful forms of cd, including cd - and cd ..

3. 
   Step 3 · 7:30

   Lesson 3: Linux time - RTC versus the system clock

   The difference between the hardware RTC and the kernel's system clock

4. 
   Step 4 · 7:23

   Lesson 4: date and hwclock - setting the hardware clock

   Showing UTC and custom formats with date -u and date +FORMAT

5. 
   Step 5 · 10:07

   Lesson 5: which, wc, lspci, gzip and tar

   Locating a command's program file with which

Courses for this path

The videos are short lessons from these courses. The courses add the demonstrations, labs and the rest of the topic.

What next

Move on to users, permissions and sudo, so that the commands you now know can be run safely with the right privileges.

Next path: Linux root and sudo security →